Be my fan on FacebookMonetizing Flash games: analyzing failures
- November 25, 2008 by Emanuele Feronato
- Filed under Flash, Game design, Monetize | 12 Comments
The web is full of successful stories about monetizing Flash games… you will find some of them in Casual Games, Hard Money or you can read about my results at The experiment – one year later.
Today I am writing about the other side of the coin… when you fail at monetizing Flash games.
You can’t always win, and sometimes things don’t go that well. It’s not a tragedy. But you must learn from your mistakes. Just like in a platform game…
This is my list of such bad things:
1) You publish the wrong version of your game
You may think it’s impossible, but that’s what happened to me. I have two computer at the office, one at home and a laptop. I was working on Christmas Couples and I compiled it on a computer without caring if MochiAds folder was in the same path. Result: in the web there is a version of this game running without MochiAds. That’s why the game has more than 10 million views and less than 8 million ads… and I am not talking about skipped ads… it’s “just” that there is an ad-less version of the game in the web.
Remedy: always test your game before publishing it… also consider using MochiAds version control when publishing your game.
2) A sponsor does not pay
Oh, yes… sometimes sponsor does not pay and do not explain why. They simply disappear. I wasn’t looking for a sponsor for Glomb game… I was just submitting it here and there when I received this email:
Hey! Is this game still available? Have you sold rights or partial rights to anyone else? and what is your exclusive purchase asking price?
Thanks for submitting :)
I replied saying I had no idea about the price, then I got this reply:
How does $750 sound (exclusive only)? Can you make a good flash introduction (clickable) for xxxxxxxxx? and have a link clickable to xxxxxxxx in the game?
I accepted and after a couple of emails the game looked like what the sponsor wanted. So he wrote:
Sorry for the long delay, I have been out of town. I will take a look and get back to you asap.
After nine months, I am still in the “asap” step… no matter of the large number of emails I sent asking for information.
Remedy: when your sponsor is not a big name, ask in forums for it, or let Flash Game License find a sponsor for you. Thanks to FGL, I got sponsorships from Kongregate, Addicting Games and Hallpass without pain. Learn more about it at Find a sponsor for your Flash game with Flash Game License.
3) A sponsor lose interest in your game
This happened with BallBalance: my game was already been sponsored by Kongregate and Addicting Games when I received another sponsorship offer to integrate the game on FaceBook. I had to slightly modify the game to make it compatible with FB and my main job at that time was taking all my time… so it took me a month to do it.
Too much. The sponsor lost interest in my game.
Remedy: even if you are making Flash games for fun like me, take it like a job when you deal with other people/companies
4) Your game does not get viral
Let’s say I submitted TileBall to all most important portals and the game did not spread at all.
After almost a year, the game still has only 300K views. Complete failure.
Remedy: I was about to say: “mail the game to everyone, submit it everywhere”, but if a game disappears in a couple of hours from most portals, maybe it’s just not funny. Recycle as much as you can, and think about your next game.
This is my experience… how did you fail at monetizing Flash games?
(17 votes, average: 4.94 out of 5)
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Cool post. I always thought you were successful in all of your endeavours but it’s nice to know that even the best of us have failures.
indeed :) good post !
yes indeed, like almost all the post here this one is also veery useful! tnx emanuele, and keep up the good work!
Ovidiu
Usually when you post a game there is an initial flood of business. Staying excited about your game is easy. But when that slows down you have to work to keep your game’s traffic up.
My last game I moved onto other projects after a few weeks and didn’t keep up with submitting my game to portals.
I think its important to put in the time to keep your game going. It can be very time consuming to submit your game to portals, contact people, etc. but it will extend the life of your game greatly.
Well, my game was never viewed once on Hallpass, and only has a 2.14/5.00 on Newgrounds… Yikes.
same problem withmy last game i uploaded with nomochiads on a big portal and i lose 200k visits… :(
I missed out on a lot of Mochi Ads hits by not including it when I originally released Word Chain on Facebook.
Other than that I’m just not convinced my games have been addictive enough to bring people back. Word Chain bumps along at around 500 impressions per day but Bumble About is basically an embarassment – though I do think with a little work on the gameplay it could do better.
I only recently saw the list here:
http://mochiland.com/articles/45-sites-to-submit-your-flash-games
I haven’t submitted to all 89 of those but I can’t decide whether to submit my games as they are, make improvements to the games first then submit or just complete my current projects and submit those.
Which highlights the main problem: there’s too much to do in not enough time and it’s difficult to decide which task will produce the most return on investment :-/
“After almost a year, the game still has only 300K views. Complete failure.”
Do I just not submit my game around enough, or are you getting a lot of traffic through your blog? My game Gravity Grid was on the front page of Newgrounds and after 53 days it has only 250,000 views.
I had about 30k views in the past 2 years for both my games—
ROFLVOIDER
and
THE FRUSTRATION QUIZ
…EPIC FAILZERON!@!!!1!!
Also, 300k views seems like the sky and beyond for me… hehe
Thank you for sharing your experience. Loving the inspiring flash games!
Hi, cool post!!
I have released only 1 game yet, but it was a failure/succes. I’v got sponsored and it was a very cool thing, but I haven’t included mochiads, nor mochibot, so I cant really track the games performance. My estimate is around 100k+ maybe more. The main problem with the game is that I have spent a lot of lot of lot of time to polish the animations and graphics which was a good thing, probably the only reason for which it has sponsored, but I have totally lost sight of the gameplay and the actual game experience and its totally boring :D
I don’t believie it is so easy so after finishing my graduade work on WrocÅ‚aw Technical University I shall test it :)
Thanks for this experiment, it opened my eyes on the ads market :D